Saturday, September 5, 2009

Temple of Venkatesh 9

After watching The Jungle Book and a National Geographic documentary on tigers, I decided to write down a few more thoughts about the temple of Venkatesh. I did this without re-reading the old posts and found that I duplicated myself in several respects.

1. I am not sure if the trappings of the temple and the surrounding jungle should resemble the Aztecs and Latin America, the Malaysians and southeast Asia, or a mix of both. The desire for the latter comes from the Jungle Book and National Geographic, both of which also tie into point two.

2. In addition to human and other PC race slaves, the yuan-ti could have a group of weretigers or werejaguars as warrior-slaves. If the Aztec motif is chosen, these slaves also serve in the arena as the championship team of ball players.

3. Duplication the first - the temple has surrounding buildings. In this case, I listed several buildings that I knew would be found at an Aztec temple or that just made sense: residential areas for yuan-ti, slave pits for slaves, a ball court, and a palace. Old posts have shown that an ossuary-reliquary-evil creepy temple of bones is also needed. I figure, after reading the old post, that the yuan-ti place the bodies of the sacrifices on the outside walls of the reliquary until scavengers and the elements have eroded all but the bone. The clean bones are then moved inside the building to serve as raw necromantic material, creepy building material, or sorted for decorations (as needed and definitely with a wall or mini pyramid of skulls). Should the reliquary be a separate building or part of the main temple structure? One level of the temple could be adorned on the exterior with the rotting bodies and the inside of that level would then serve as the reliquary. This ensures that the PCs do not have to invade/investigate a separate building in order to use all the cool imagery and undead potential.

4. Duplication the second - the upper levels of the temple are only for snake-bodied yuan-ti and they use footstep-based traps to ensure this. This is all old-hat but watching Fritz the Cat (at the end with the revolutionaries who are going to blow up the power plant) gave me the idea that the simple sound of footsteps is an automatic alert on these levels to the presence of someone who shouldn't be there.

5. The body of the explorer (and his half of the map) could be among the bones of the reliquary. Perhaps the possessions of the sacrifices are stored in the treasure chamber and they could find the map therein.